News - Samsung hired students to negatively review HTC in Taiwan

[HEXUS]

Also it seems like Samsung is envious about the HTC One’s build quality.

Read more.

[TheAnimus]

Why can't they be more like Apple and just get people to write critical reviews of competitors products they've not used for free?

[JSanders]

Why can't they be more like Apple and just get people to write critical reviews of competitors products they've not used for free?

That burn. wait: Samsung envious? I think they are kicking themselves. From a company that was like Apple in terms of product design, we now have professional envy...

[aidanjt]

Naughty, Samsung... Have a bit more class.

[crossy]

A site called TaiwanSamsungLeaks published documents that are allegedly from Samsung’s marketing team, listing its hired guns’ negative forum posts upon various tech and gadget sites. The site has accused Samsung of “evil marketing” practices.

That stinks ... even though I've got two Samsung devices (phone and tablet - and I like both) my opinion is that the Taiwanese authorities need to stamp this kind of Dick Dastardly practice out before it gets popular - nice big fine (i.e. bigger than £1m) should do it.

A statement upon Samsung Taiwan’s Facebook page admitted the skulduggery and said it regretted “any inconvenience and confusion from the Internet event.” Furthermore “Samsung Taiwan has halted all Internet marketing such as posting articles on websites” according to the same statement. In addition the BBC received a statement from Samsung saying the “unfortunate incident” went against the company’s “fundamental principles”.

The "fundamental principle" presumably being "if you're going to do something underhand and evil, then don't get caught doing it"?

I'm thinking that this could backfire badly on Samsung - after all, if they're worried enough about the HTC One to try and smear it like this then it's obviously because it IS a superior device.

And no, I'm not an HTC fanboy (before anyone levels that accusation) - never owned anything by them.

An “all-metal” Galaxy S4 was made for internal company testing and was very popular with execs, says Cnet’s source. The tech site speculates that Samsung will debut an all-metal design spearheaded by the next Galaxy Note phablet. The Note 3 “will not use the design guidelines of the Galaxy S4”.

Not sure I'd necessarily want an all metal phone - but if the S4 uses the same back design as the S3 then I'd DEFINITELY want that changed. The dictionary definition of "flimsy" could be "Samsung Galaxy S3 phone back". Shame, because the rest of the phone is pretty solid.

[Noxvayl]

I think if this is found to be true then Samsung need to make an advertising campaign that apologises for this bad conduct. It is so easy for the general public to miss news like this so a fine is likely to have little effect on the practise; instead of being forced to cough up thousands or millions of pounds they should be forced to spend that sort of money on marketing that corrects the false information they have spread.

[bridges009]

Curious that they would do this in HTCs backyard.

[zoomee]

Doubt this is true tbh.
Having been a loyal HTC customer for many years I can honestly say HTC are getting what they deserve in this day and age. No longer do we have to put up with the latest spectacular hardware being let down by shoddy programming and skimping (i.e. no hardware acceleration), and lack of support for ever so slightly-older models. HTC had it coming and should take it like a man tbh.
Saying that if samsung is guilty - throw the book at them!!!

[killer7xx]

I think Samsung are showing their opportunistic side, HTC were going on a downward trend and Samsung tried to jump on the bandwagon. I remember a few years ago, they gave free Galaxy phones to people who vented about their dissatisfaction with their iphones on twitter.

[crossy]

Doubt this is true tbh.
Having been a loyal HTC customer for many years I can honestly say HTC are getting what they deserve in this day and age. No longer do we have to put up with the latest spectacular hardware being let down by shoddy programming and skimping (i.e. no hardware acceleration), and lack of support for ever so slightly-older models.

What's to doubt? According to the article (and it's also been reported by AFP) (my underline):

A statement upon Samsung Taiwan’s Facebook page admitted the skulduggery and said it regretted “any inconvenience and confusion from the Internet event.” Furthermore “Samsung Taiwan has halted all Internet marketing such as posting articles on websites” according to the same statement

You've probably got a point on the lack of updates - but the midrange phones seem to be well thought of. E.g. I know a couple of folks with 1S's and they're very complimentary (apart from about Sense, which is a POS), and one of the kids got an 8S and first comment was that it feels pretty solid compared to the Samsung phone she had before.

[Meowdance]

Fining Samsung half a million pounds is like someone taking a handful of my crisps.

[jrbarnes729]

Companies these days will do anything to get ahead of the competition.

Doesn't surprise me one bit.

[The Hand]

Well I hope HTC keep their head above water. I would certainly consider a HTC Windows phone in the future, if they are still around that is. Very nice build quality on the HTC 8s windows phone that I had a play with a while back... the only draw back it had was it only had 4GB of memory, of which, less than 1GB was available for apps, so ended up deciding against it.. If they had just put 8GB of memory in, I would be using one now; that said, I'm still very happy with my Lumia 620.

[crossy]

Well I hope HTC keep their head above water. I would certainly consider a HTC Windows phone in the future, if they are still around that is. Very nice build quality on the HTC 8s windows phone that I had a play with a while back... the only draw back it had was it only had 4GB of memory, of which, less than 1GB was available for apps, so ended up deciding against it.. If they had just put 8GB of memory in, I would be using one now; that said, I'm still very happy with my Lumia 620.

Yes, that's a pain, although I suppose you can at least move your videos etc to uSD. The guy I feel sorry for is the OP on this thread - wanted to install a mapping/nav app and it grabbed half of his available memory!

Actually that thread also talks about some app that might allow some reclamation of space - got to be worth a try? Hopefully, HTC/Microsoft will get their stuff together and do something to fix this - as said on the thread, installing to uSD would be ideal (a la Android), but even if it allowed a user to migrate app data that would be something.

[TheAnimus]

The issue is that not all flash is created equal and MS have made some assumptions (yey!) for performance reasons about what the speed and access times of the data store where the program is. Even things like the loading image you see whilst the app starts is a specifically arranged block of data, so the phone can immediately load and show the image whilst its really loading, this is why on some slower phones (like my omnia7, 800mhz single core) you can see a tiny flicker between the Vendors Logo + App Name and a progress bar appearing. The bitmap loads, then the loader code loads, which provides you with visual indication of the app loading. Sounds verbose, but if your app isn't up and usable in 3 seconds, people hate it.

Now allowing uSD would be an odd one, because ultimately they would have to certify and rank it, can you imagine peoples reactions to "I'm sorry your flash is too slow" which they would immediately say "I bought this class 10 card for soo much money, how dare you" or better yet, "I'm sorry, your uSD card has started to slow down lately".

They could look at addressing these issues, working around it in the OS, maybe even splitting the apps a bit, so the loading bitmap is always on phone internal memory. However I think they have higher priorities. Windows Phone has been a reboot of the old Windows Mobile, which allowed anything, it was terrible, terrible anarchy. This is a problem I find with Andriod (S3 and N7) even now. The idea of making it more restrictive, about been a consumption phone device rather than something for the embedded electronics market, means they have to add these features slowly sadly.

[rabbid]

Fining Samsung half a million pounds is like someone taking a handful of my crisps.

And it would probably be the cutomer (us) paying their fines at the end of the day as they will just decrease the discounts available until its covered..

It highlights the point though that possibly reviews by anyone unknown to you are to be taken with a pinch of salt...